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Saturday, April 14, 2007

Statistical Madness - Overpopulation

Over Population of the Planet?

All of the people on this great earth could fit and live in the state of Alaska with enough extra room to accommodate growth for the next 10 years!!

How did I figure that? One of the most densely populated areas in the world is Hong Kong with 6300 people per square kilometer. Times that with the land mass of Alaska (1,717,855 km²)and you have enough room for over ten billion people. Think of all of the land on the earth that isn't Alaska?

There is plenty of space to go around.

If you listen closely to the cries of people who say the world is over populated it is often when they are stuck in traffic, waiting in lines or obstructed by a crowd from seeing a good accident. So the problem isn't that there are too many people it is that we have really crappy systems for getting people from one place to another, having services performed and enjoying the things we want.

Space isn't the issue. Design, implementation and patients are the issue.

But all things aside there are still parts of the herd I would like to see thinned out..lol

7 comments:

You know, I don't think it's that there are too many people, it's that the people are destroying the planet.

I get mad at golf courses. I see them as a complete waste of space and think it's stupid that that land is torn up so that rich,elitist, white fuckers can smack around a ball that is an inch and a half in diameter.

No offense to people who are rich, white, elitist or in any way a fucker.

The lager issue at play here in my opinion is that the human race has for many thousands of years managed to remove themselfs from the process of natural selection.

Take, for instance, rats. If you enclose rats in a cage and give them the same amount of food each day and allow them to reproduce normally you see interesting results. The rats who are now removed from the usual predators and ailments of living in the wild will soon multiply to a number greater than the cage or thier food source will allow. Eventually the rats exibit traits far from normal for thier species. They will fight for territory and resourses that are limited until ultimately the weakest among them have been killed off and the population stays at a sustainable rate.

In a far more complicated version of this process I believe that our species is going through much the same process. While food is in abundance there are still many who do not have enough to eat and thousands die of starvation each day. Those resources that are limited, say, oil, become the driving factor in wars and countless death and destruction. In our case the unfortuneate factor is that not the physically strong but rather the financially elite will survive in our completely fucked up culture.